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Irris was a changed man. When he went out fishing, he didn't spend the day drunk or asleep in the boat and then come home with nothing, the way everyone expected. Instead he made a full day's catch early, and then picked up an axe and went to cut wood. He sat down to dinner sober, played with the baby, spoke pleasantly to his wife and sister. In the evening, instead of drinking, he sat in front of the fire and knotted nets, or carved fishhooks. It's because he almost died, the neighbors whispered. Everyone had seen the scar. Everyone wondered how long the change could last.

There were other things, little strangenesses that never made their way out of the house for the villagers to be aware of them. For instance, one afternoon Ytine brought him a dish of vetch, and he said, "My dear, it amuses me to call this gravel. So the next time I ask you for a bowl of gravel, you'll know what I want." Water was poison, working was sleeping. The list of changed names seemed to grow every day. Voud wasn't sure why Ytine went along with it, except that the new Irris was kind and hard-working, and doted on the baby. And maybe, thought Voud, that was reason enough. The crane had said not to waste her grief on Irris, and she hadn't cried when she'd heard the whispery-voiced god say he was dead.

But one evening Irris came home in an especially good mood. "Good fishing means good trading," he said. He had needles, and fiber -- dyed and spun -- for Ytine, and a tiny, wheeled cart for the baby. "And Voud," he said, "I hear you're a hunter." He handed her a bronze knife. It was small and its plain haft was dented, but it was a real metal knife and it was hers.

That was when she knew for certain that her brother was dead. Irris would never have thought to buy her something she wanted so much. Not without her telling him, and likely not even then. She sat there with the knife in her hand and cried.

"Voud!" said Ytine, alarmed.

The baby, who had been sitting splay-legged, pushing the little cart back and forth, looked up and began to wail. Irris picked him up. "Hush, little one, hush." But he looked at Voud with no pretense in his eyes. He knew why she was crying.

Ytine had to know, too, but all she said was, "You're tired, that's what it is. Time for bed."

The next day Voud was knee deep in water, pulling the down from the cattails, stuffing it into a bag that hung from her shoulder. The baby sat on the shore clutching his toy cart in one hand, meditatively squishing mud through the fingers of the other. The shadow of a thought crossed his face. "Don't eat that," said Voud. She waded back to shore, wiped the tiny hand on the hem of her tunic and gave him a piece of hard bread instead.

"Da!" said the baby. Voud looked up and saw Irris.

He came near, sat down, and set the baby in his lap. "I didn't kill him," he said while the baby gnawed happily on the bread.

Voud thought about that for a moment. "Who are you?"

"I'd prefer not to answer that right now."

"Because you don't want to say and you can't lie."

"Oh, I can lie." He smoothed the baby's hair. "But."

"For a god, speaking is using its power," said Voud.

"If I say something that's already true, I've spent nothing. If I say something that isn't true, then it depends on how big a change it would take, to make what I'd said the truth. The bigger the change, the more power it would drain from me. And some things can never be true."

"Don't gods say untrue things on purpose sometimes, to make things happen?"

"You climb down a ladder and don't hurt yourself, but you would if you fell off the roof." He frowned, just slightly. "If the lies aren't too big, or too numerous, a god can regain its strength through prayers and sacrifices. But I don't have worshippers here, and your brother's death gave me just enough power to move in and repair his body."

Voud sighed. "He wasn't a very good brother."

"But he was your brother," said Irris. They were silent for a while. The baby's eyes began to droop, the soggy fragment of bread still clutched in his hand.

"Are you good, or bad?" Voud asked.

He smiled. "The answer to that question is complicated, and it wouldn't tell you what you want to know. I was very powerful once. That was millions of years ago."

"Millions?"

"Do you know a hundred?"

"Yes."

"A hundred of a hundred hundreds would make one million."

Voud frowned. "Are there that many years?"

Irris raised an eyebrow. She thought he might have laughed if the baby hadn't been asleep. "Beneath the dirt we're sitting on, under the water, in layers of stone, are remains of creatures whose day came and went much longer ago than a single million years."

The thought was dizzying, and Voud blinked it away. "So how did you get here?"

"I was on the losing side of a battle, a long time ago. Now it's a desert hundreds of miles from the coast, but then it was near the sea. Our enemies made the water sweep inland and drowned us. For millions of years, I lay buried where I fell, until the ground eroded away from around my bones, and your brother came, and his killer rashly offered me your brother's blood and body."

"If I sacrificed to you," Voud said, thinking of Anghat, "you'd have power."

"Save your prayers for your marsh gods," said Irris, looking off into the cattails. She followed his gaze. The crane stood there, managing somehow to give the impression of glaring balefully.

"I don't think I know you," said the crane.

"It would have been before your time," said Irris.

"So I hear, and I'm not pleased to hear it. There's a reason that place is forbidden, and a reason there's a curse on anyone who spills blood there."

"There's a reason for everything," Irris said.

"Why are you here?"

"I knew nothing of humans beyond what I read in Irris's mind, but that was enough to know the world had changed a great deal. He thought of this place as quiet and remote, and that suited me."

"Swear you mean no harm to the village," the crane demanded.

"The man who cut my throat said he was paid to do it," said Irris. Voud frowned, and thought again of Anghat and his whispering god. Irris stood, awkwardly because of the still-sleeping baby. "I'll take him home," he said to Voud.

When he had gone, she waded back into the cattails. "Be careful, Voud," said the crane. "I don't believe he's as powerless as he implies. I still don't understand why he came here."

"He didn't have anywhere to go," Voud said. She thought of her brother, alone in the desert with no one to help him when he needed it.

"Don't assume that means he's not dangerous. I can't interfere for the same reason I can't interfere with Anghat, but you've always been a resourceful child."

Anghat accused Irris of being an imposter when nearly everyone was home eating dinner. Children who had been playing on the roofs, jumping over gaps and skipping around the plumes of smoke that came up from the village's fires, ran from house to house calling out what they'd heard, that Anghat wanted a trial, wanted Irris to prove he wasn't a god!

Within a half hour the whole village was crowded around the headman's roof, where Irris, Anghat, and the headman himself stood. In a loud, clear voice the headman explained the accusation and asked, "Are you the same man who left this village?"

"Would you be the same man you were, if you'd had your throat cut and been left for dead?" Irris asked.

There was a mutter of agreement, but "He hasn't answered!" shouted Anghat. Which, Voud could see, the watching villagers realized was true. But Anghat seemed too vehement, and everyone knew he stood to gain if Irris were expelled, and Irris was just so different these days . . . the debate hissed and whispered through the watchers.